CDS (II) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 93 of 120

Correct — B, Church. The beneficiaries of the 1598 order were the Jesuits, and what they were asking permission for at the port of Cambay was a house of prayer of their own. By that date the Society of Jesus had been at Akbar's court for eighteen years across three separate missions — the first arrived at Fatehpur Sikri in 1580, a second followed in 1591, and the third, led by Jerome Xavier, reached Lahore on 5 May 1595 and stayed on in Mughal service until 1614. Akbar had already given the fathers ground at Agra on which a church was raised, and he granted Xavier a farman guaranteeing freedom of worship to Christians when the mission's position looked unsafe. Cambay is the piece that makes the order make sense: it was Gujarat's great ocean port, the point at which Portuguese shipping and Jesuit personnel entered Mughal territory, and the fathers of the earlier missions had themselves been received there on their way inland. A standing Christian community of merchants and missionaries at a working port, an emperor already in the habit of granting the Jesuits ground and protection — the building being licensed is a church.

• (a)Temple — Akbar's dealings with temples are real enough — he abolished the pilgrim tax and the jizya in the mid-1560s and made grants to shrines — but a temple at Cambay needed no special imperial licence from a ruler on those terms, and it is not what the 1598 order was about.
• (c)Synagogue — India's old Jewish communities were on the Konkan coast and at Cochin on the Malabar coast, not at Cambay, and no Mughal order licensing a synagogue in Gujarat is part of this record.
• (d)Jain Upashraya — The strongest of the wrong answers, because Akbar's Gujarat connection with Jainism is genuine — the Svetambara teacher Hiravijaya Suri was invited to his court in the 1580s and Akbar issued orders restricting animal slaughter on certain days. But that relationship produced protections for Jain teachers and pilgrimage places, not a licence to build at Cambay in 1598, and the recipients that year were the Jesuits.

Akbar's religious policy went well beyond personal curiosity. He ended the pilgrim tax and then the jizya in the mid-1560s, opened the Ibadat Khana at Fatehpur Sikri in 1575 for debate that soon drew Jains, Zoroastrians and Christians as well as Muslim scholars, and worked to the principle later summed up as sulh-i kul, absolute peace between faiths. Three Jesuit missions came to his court in that climate, and their surviving letters are among the best European descriptions of the Mughal court we possess.

Two things are worth being straight about on this question. The first is the printing. The stem as it stands in the booklet reads 'permitting in the city of Cambay (Khambat), Gujarat, the construction of a' — the words 'permitting' and 'the construction of' have been pulled apart by the place name, and Khambhat is spelt without its h, so the sentence has to be read twice before it parses. Neither slip changes what is asked. The second is the evidence. The wording of the 1598 farman itself comes down to us through translations of Mughal documents rather than through any standard textbook, so the safer ground to reason from is the mission record — three Jesuit embassies to Akbar, an existing church at Agra built on land he granted, and a farman he issued in favour of Christian worship. On that record a church is the only option that fits, and it is what the key marks.

• The first Jesuit mission reached Akbar's court at Fatehpur Sikri in 1580; a second came in 1591; the third, under Jerome Xavier, reached Lahore on 5 May 1595 and Xavier remained in Mughal service until 1614.
• Akbar gave the Jesuit fathers land at Agra on which a church was built — the first Roman Catholic church in the Mughal empire.
• Akbar granted Jerome Xavier a farman guaranteeing freedom of worship to Christians after earlier requests had been refused.
• Cambay, modern Khambhat in Gujarat, was the leading port of western India in the medieval centuries; Marco Polo noted it as a busy port in 1293, and its harbour later silted up so that trade moved to Surat.
• The Ibadat Khana debates began at Fatehpur Sikri in 1575, and Akbar abolished the jizya on non-Muslims in the mid-1560s.

• Assuming the answer must be Jain because Gujarat and Akbar's Jain contacts are both real — the recipients in 1598 were the Jesuits.
• Placing Akbar's church at Cambay rather than remembering that the better-known one is at Agra.
• Reading Akbar's tolerance as conversion — very few conversions followed, and the Jesuits' own letters say so.

As a one-line factual item on Akbar's farmans and the Jesuits, or inside a statements question on his religious policy.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Jesuit missions that visited Akbar's court arrived first at which one of the following places?

  • (a)Agra
  • (b)Fatehpur Sikri
  • (c)Lahore
  • (d)Ajmer

  Answer(b) Fatehpur Sikri — the first mission reached Akbar's newly built capital in 1580; Jerome Xavier's third mission went to Lahore in 1595, by which time the court had moved.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Cambay, mentioned in Mughal and earlier records as a major port, is the older name of which present-day town?

  • (a)Bharuch
  • (b)Khambhat
  • (c)Veraval
  • (d)Porbandar

  Answer(b) Khambhat — the Gulf of Khambhat still carries the anglicised form, and the port's trade later shifted to Surat as its harbour silted up.